“The English language is forever changing. New words appear; old ones fall out of use or alter their meanings. World Wide Words tries to record at least a part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech.”

But, that’s all that was said about the site in that post…

Here are a few excerpts from the page about the founder of the site, Michael Quinion(the whole Bio is fascinating…):

“After Cambridge University, where he studied physical sciences, he joined BBC radio as a studio manager.”

“After [two other positions] he returned to working for himself, writing scripts for exhibitions, taking on a freelance curatorial role, creating audio-visual programmes…”

“After illness forced him to take early retirement, he turned to his lifelong love of the English language. Yet another chance encounter led him to become a freelance reader for the Oxford English Dictionary, between 1992 and 2016 supplying more than 175,000 examples of English usage old and new. He also compiled a third of the entries for the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of New Words. In 1996, he took advantage of spare space on his son’s website to begin posting articles on language. This soon evolved into the World Wide Words website and its associated newsletter. More than 900 issues have appeared.”

Contents

Q:From Helen Mosback: I have just read a serialised version of John Rowland’s Calamity in Kent. It includes this: “In fact, it’s your pigeon, as they say in the civil service.” I was wondering if you could shed any light on the expression it’s your pigeon? I have to admit to being quite taken by the Polish expression not my circus, not my monkeys to indicate that something is not one’s problem, and would be very happy should I have found an equally enchanting English expression!

A: Readers may not be familiar with John Rowland, a little-known and neglected British detective-story writer who published Calamity in Kent in 1950. The British Library has republished it this year in its Crime Classics series.

The date of his book is significant, since at that time the expression was more familiar to people in the countries of what is now the Commonwealth than it is now. It had come into the language around the end of the nineteenth century.

The idiom suggests something is the speaker’s interest, concern, area of expertise or responsibility. This is a recent British example:

If posh people aren’t your pigeon, the correspondence on display in this book will be a massive bore and irritation.

The Times, 8 Oct. 2016.

It also turns up in the negative in phrases such as “that’s not my pigeon”, denying involvement or responsibility in some matter.

There’s quite a bit more of this article on the site…

And, from the article, In the news:

Oxford Dictionaries announced its Word of the Year 2016 on 16 November: post-truth. Its editors defined this as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” One example came in a report in The Times on 31 October of comments by the president of the European Council on the signing of a trade deal with Canada: “Mr Tusk also denounced the ‘post-truth politics … on both sides of the Atlantic’ which nearly scuppered the deal because ‘facts and figures won’t stand up for themselves’ against an emotional opposition campaign.” Though it has been very much a word of this year, connected both with the Brexit referendum in the UK and the US presidential election, Oxford Dictionaries noted that “post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine.”

I receive Michael Quinion’s newsletter from World Wide Words—always something interesting or strange or wonderful :-)

Here’s a recent example:

Q: “From Bob Taxin, San Francisco — I was watching an Australian murder mystery on television where a teacher criticised her student’s grotesque theory of what might have happened to the victim by saying that she must have read too many penny dreadfuls. I presume this refers to some sort of horror story, perhaps which sold for a penny. Any thoughts on this?

A: “They were indeed sold for a penny, a British penny. And they were considered to be dreadful for reasons that will become clear.

“It was common in the nineteenth century to publish works in serial form or in magazines — Dickens’s novels, for example, first appeared this way. Such magazines were directed at the educated and affluent reading public and were usually priced at a shilling, unaffordable by the working man.

“To meet demand among the less well-off, some publishers brought out serials of inferior technical and literary quality, accompanied by vivid illustrations, which were sold in penny instalments. These featured sensationalist and lurid tales of highwaymen, pirates and murderers as well as exaggerated stories of real-life crimes. They were most popular among young men, who would sometimes club together to buy single copies which one person might read to others who were illiterate. The genre was widely regarded by the middle classes and by magistrates as a corrupting influence among young people and a cause of the rise in juvenile crime. This was contested by others and most famously disputed by G K Chesterton in his essay of 1901, A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls.”

And, Mr. Quinion himself?

“…Michael concentrates on World Wide Words and on providing citations and advice for the Oxford English Dictionary. He also wrote a third of the entries for the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of New Words and compiled a weekly New Words column in the Daily Telegraph.”